Group Key Distribution in Ad-Hoc Networks Using MIKEY

Ad-hoc networks are gaining more and more popularity to-gether with the technological advancements in the field of mobile devices and mobile network technologies. Secure communication in these networks requires the traffic to be encrypted, and there are many security protocols available for this task, but most of them need a key management scheme to work properly. Characteristics and limitations of ad-hoc networks pose special demands to the group key man-agement and, thus, some of the solutions used with fixed net-works might be inapplicable to this new environment. This paper briefly describes these special properties of ad-hoc net-works and their implications on group key management. The most important goal of the paper is to introduce a new group key management protocol, MIKEY, and to present and ana-lyze different approaches of how it can be used to establish a group key for a small-sized group. This paper focuses on the topological aspects of the key distribution process, that, as it turns out, have a lot of implications for the total success of the stable group communication